Wisconsin-based VideoPropulsion Interactive Television and New Delhi-based MultiVirt India are now demonstrating a new, very low cost headend system for Local Cable Television Operators (LCOs) in India. The two companies announced their collaboration early in 2015 and are now ready to deliver an inexpensive digital headend solution tailored specifically for the Indian digital Community Access Television (CATV) market.

The partners’ premier offering is a MultiVirt integrated headend appliance capable of selectively receiving up to 200 channels of Free to Air (FTA) programming via Digital Video Broadcasting – Satellite – Second Generation (DVB-S2) satellite, and then re-modulating the programs over Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) on a coax network to Digital Video Broadcasting – Cable (DVB-C) Set Top Boxes (STB). The single 4U chassis employs VideoPropulsion’s preeminent, high-density DVB-C QAM modulator Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) cards.

The system has been designed for the LCO to optionally merge up to 40 of its own local programs into the coax cable plant multiplex via an Ethernet port on the appliance. The locally supplied content is encoded into MPEG2 or H.264, then transmitted to the VideoPropulsion QAM where it is combined with up to 200 FTA channels for delivery over the cable network to the subscribers’ STBs. This makes for an affordable 240 Channel headend, ideal for small, remote operators, according to the company.

Additional options and upgrades include the ability to do hardware transcodes of any of the programs to or from MPEG2 or H.264, as well as the ability to encrypt any of the programs using a variety of conditional access schemes such as Conax, Novel-SuperTV, Cryptoguard, Irdeto, and others.

“Our new VPro-S Headend represents an exciting new opportunity for us to provide a large segment of CATV markets in India with a powerful and affordable solution,” said Rakesh Gupta, founder and director of MultiVirt.